"Polizeiruf 110" in the first: Why this thriller is scary
Created: 10/30/2022, 8:15 p.m
By: Rudolf Ogiermann
Where did I get here?
Claudia Michelsen as Commissioner Doreen Brasch investigates a murder in a small village at the foot of the Brocken in the Harz mountains.
© Conny Klein/MDR
The ARD wanted to present a "Polizeiruf 110" suitable for Halloween, which plays on the legendary Brocken in the Harz Mountains and which is about the occult and the supernatural.
But the thriller "Burning Witches" with Claudia Michelsen does not keep what it promises.
Frightening faces and firelight, swirling fog and the inevitable cry of an owl - or was it that of a human being?
The creators of this crime thriller routinely play with the elements of the - of course adult - horror film, including two mysterious girls who seem to hover above things.
Archaic customs as a backdrop behind which murders happen - in principle not a bad plot, as a Black Forest "crime scene" interwoven with the Alemannic carnival showed years ago.
But in this "Polizeiruf 110", which takes place at the foot of the legendary Brocken in the Harz Mountains, this concept does not work.
All too obviously screenwriter Wolfgang Stauch wrote “Burning Witches” with Halloween in mind.
Because if you turn off the fog machine, this episode turns out to be a breathtakingly one-dimensional construct of a conflict between men and women in the village, which claims one death after the other.
Marriages that are out of breath, frustrated mothers, sons, doctors and pastors, the whole thing located in a strangely lifeless place - it smells seven kilometers against the wind, and the oh so meaningful signs on the walls don't change that.
If all of this weren't involuntarily weird, one would have to frown at the morality according to which the weakened strong take revenge on the weakened, stronger sex, each with a dead dog (!) as warning sign - in detail, by the way, completely unrealistic.
It might still work as a horror comedy, but author Stauch and director Ute Wieland don't show a double bottom, instead they torment their audience with melancholy dialogues in run-down establishments, with bizarre "witch dances" in the forest, with looks into dusty books and rusty torture tools .
As in the wrong film, Claudia Michelsen must feel like commissioner Doreen Brasch – and you can tell that a bit.
What Brasch and her boss Uwe Lemp (Felix Vörtler) (have to) show here cannot be called investigative work.
The fact that head of the commissioner Lemp drinks with the obscure villagers without professional distance and then stumbles across the cemetery with them is one of very few scenes that show what could have been made of this material.
The rest is creepy.